This TED Talk features legal empowerment advocate Vivek Muru, recorded live at TED Global 2017.

I want to tell you about someone. I'm going to call him Ravi Nanda. I'm changing his name to protect his safety.

Ravi's from a community of herds people in Gujarat,

on the western coast of India.

Same place my own family comes from.

When he was 10 years old,

his entire community was forced to move

because a multinational corporation constructed a manufacturing facility

on the land where they lived.

Then, 20 years later, the same company built a cement factory,

100 meters from where they live now.

India's got strong environmental regulations on paper,

but this company has violated many of them.

Dust from that factory covers Ravi's mustache and everything he wears.

I spent just two days in his place,

and I coughed for a week.

Ravi says that if people or animals

eat anything that grows in his village

or drink the water, they get sick.

He says, children now walk long distances with cattle and buffalo

to find uncontaminated grazing land.

He says, many of those kids have dropped out of school, including three of his own.

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